In short, if we mean to be philosophical, our main concern will be that our beliefs should be true; we shall care very little whether they happen to be popular or unpopular with the intellectual ‘proletarians’ of the moment, and if we can get at a truth, we shall not mind having to go back a long way for it.  Indeed, when one wants to get on the track of the most ultimate and important truths of all, there is usually a great positive advantage in going back a very long way for them.  The questions which deal with first principles, being the simplest—­though the hardest—­of all, are mostly raised very simply and directly by Plato and Aristotle, who were the very first writers to raise them.  In the discussions of later times, the great simple questions about principles have so often been overlaid by mainly irrelevant accretions of secondary details that it is usually very hard indeed ’to see the wood for the trees’.  This is the chief reason why one who, like myself, finds it his main business in life to introduce younger men and women to the study of Philosophy must think indifference to Greek literature about the worst misfortune which could happen to our intellectual civilization.

I have tried in what I have said so far to explain what I understand by the philosophical spirit and what I regard as the primary problems with which Philosophy has to wrestle.  If what I have said is not wholly wide of the mark, it should be clear what is the deadliest enemy of the true spirit of Philosophy.  It is the temper which is too indolent to think out a question for itself and consequently prefers to accept traditional ready-made answers to the problems of Science and Life.  Traditionalism, wherever it is found, is the enemy, because Traditionalism is only another name for indolence.  Observe that I say Traditionalism, not Tradition.  Nowhere in life, and least of all in Philosophy, is the solitary likely to work to much purpose unless he has behind him that body of organized sound sense which we call Tradition.  And I do not mean that true philosophers are necessarily ‘heretics’, or that ‘orthodoxy’ is less philosophical than ‘heterodoxy’.  I mean that however true an ‘orthodox’ proposition may be, it is no living truth for me unless I have made it my own, as its first discoverer did, by personal labour of the spirit.  The truth is something which each generation must rediscover for itself.  True traditions may be quite as injurious, if they have become mere traditions, as false ones.  It was not so much because the Aristotelian doctrines were false that the unquestioning acceptance of Aristotelian formulae all but strangled human thought in the later days of Scholasticism.  Some of these doctrines were false, but many of them were much truer than anything the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had to put in their place, and the rediscovery of their real meaning is perhaps the chief service of the Hegelian school to Philosophy.  The trouble was that mechanical repetition of Aristotle’s formulae as matters of course inevitably led to loss of real insight into the meaning the formulae had borne for Aristotle.